What could cause my system not to boot into the Windows 10 installer from a presumably correctly built USB drive, like ever?
When trying, I see the screen flickering once (~.5s), and then it shows the boot animation (a simple spinner) on the manufacturer's boot screen (Gigabyte logo, plus a white bar at the bottom), just as it does when the USB drive is not plugged in. This spinner will stay there forever (I've waited up to an hour), but nothing happens.
I've physically removed all other SATA drives from the system to rule out any effect they might have.
UEFI system. Only Windows 10 was installed before, but stopped booting (which is why I'm trying to boot into the recovery system from the USB in the first place).
I've tried both by selecting the USB drive from the F12 boot target menu my UEFI firmware offers, as well as by rearranging priorities until it has top spot.
I've tested both with the option "Default Secure boot" enabled as well as disabled. I haven't seen any difference.
I've also restored the default settings, which also hasn't made any difference.
The USB drive has been created by downloading the latest Windows 10 ISO using Microsoft's MediaCreationTool, then writing it to the drive using the latest version of Rufus. File system has been set to FAT32. Partition scheme has been set to GPT. (But I've also tested both the hybrid MBR/GPT as well as the pure MBR schemes to no avail.)
The same USB drive boots just fine into the Windows 10 installer on another UEFI system.
I've tested two different USB drives, the Windows 10 installer won't boot from either. I was able to boot Linux Mint from both successfully.
The only other possibly interesting (or misleading) data point I have is that if I pull the USB drive at just the right moment during the boot process, I'll get a 'blue screen' that looks like a Windows installation screen. This led me to believe that it did indeed load something from the USB drive. Or maybe it didn't, and this just somehow triggered the message.
It says "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed" and offers me three options: "Enter to try again", "F8 for Startup Settings" and "Esc for UEFI Firmware Settings".
I press F8, and I end up back on the black manufacturer screen, this time without a loading spinner animation.
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TLDR: Correctly built Windows 10 USB drive doesn't work on a single machine that has no other drives. Linux boots just fine on the same machine. Why?
Answer
Seems like the culprit was presumably hardware failure of the dedicated GPU.
One more data point I hadn't mentioned before was that Mint would freeze for pretty exactly 240s while booting from the USB drive, also with a black screen. But then it did come up.
I tried booting Ubuntu from a USB drive next, and it wouldn't start at all, just like Windows environments.
Even the common fix of setting nomodeset in the grub options had no effect.
Eventually, I switched off the dedicated GPU in the UEFI configuration, and since then, I can boot just fine from all USB drives.
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